The Resurrection of a Ring
May 24th, 2014 by James L. Sweaney, CGA, FGA. GGWe recently completed the resurrection of a ring that had been severely damaged.
Fine jewelry is made from precious materials that when properly cared for, will last for centuries. Gemstones are durable and ancient– diamond crystals are typically 1 to 2 billion years old. Gold is eternal. It doesn’t deteriorate and is never discarded– if a style or use becomes outdated or obsolete, gold is simply recycled into a new item. The gold ring on your finger almost certainly contains gold from ancient times, perhaps from the tombs of the Pharaohs!
But even the most well made ring will not survive the ravages of a garbage disposal! Our client accidentally dropped this and several other rings into her fast spinning garbage disposal. Can you imagine the screams of anguish over the grinding racket?
After she recovered emotionally from the catastrophe, she came to our shop and asked us to reconstruct the ring. Fortunately, we had seen the ring before the accident and she had the remains shown above. Even luckier, four diamonds remained — we could measure and grade them so the new ring would be up to snuff.
Invisible setting diamonds and gemstones requires special tooling and techniques so we worked with a specialist to make the new ring. The rubies had to be specially cut and fitted to follow the complex curve along the sides– each stone is actually a narrower at the bottom, a trapezoid shape rather than a square like the diamonds across the top. Our client wanted an exact duplicate so we used CAD to recreate the ring precisely– here’s the working CAD
And here’s one of the CAD renderings we showed our client
Anytime you try to recreate something, whether a physical object or an experience, you hope to get as close as possible. But as the saying goes, you can’t step into the same river twice. We think we managed to rise to the occasion.
Happy to say, our client was very pleased.
At Mardon, we welcome challenges like this. We rely on our state-of-the-art technology and years of experience making fine custom jewelry to be able to satisfy the needs of our clients. And custom jewelry can be quite reasonable. We make the item from scratch, our high-tech process is quite efficient and by dealing directly with the maker, you don’t pay any extra markups.
Tags: CAD jewelry design, Custom Jewelry, diamond, invisible setting, Ruby